IT's still a case of jobs for the boys

This week we carry an article on women and the IT industry, which we hope will spark off a debate about attitudes to women in the channel.

I say channel because, in my opinion, there is a definite difference between the channel and, for example, corporate computing. In corporate computing there are more companies where women have made it to the top, sit on the board and have the same clout as men.

It is still far too low but better than the channel.

The channel is at least 10 years behind in its attitude to women and holds parity with the trading floor of an aggressive American merchant bank. Is this an exaggeration? Not if a conversation I had recently at a trade show was anything to go by. I was sitting having a quiet lemonade or two with the MDs of (yes) Northern businesses. Yorkshire businesses actually. A woman joined us and the talk turned to career prospects. She declared that she would have to move jobs to further her career in sales since the company actively discouraged women from long-term careers.

To my astonishment, one of the MDs pitched in with a declaration of every possible discriminatory statement from the cliche manual about how women's work was inferior to men, finishing his diatribe by saying he would always promote a man over a woman and most reseller companies in his neck of the woods would do so as well. The nub of his argument was that his client companies would look down on women so he would not employ them in senior positions.

If his company is still in business I hope the skills shortage has forced him to employ more women. But the fact that it takes a skills shortage to push more women into IT is a damning indictment of our industry. This man's business will eventually suffer at the hands of blind prejudice.

But in addition to those who, like him, consciously believe women to be less capable, there are those who agree that women can be successful at jobs such as engineering and IT but consider female engineers to be 'somehow suspect'. There are many academic studies which prove this.

But why believe academics? Half the time I don't.

It is barely credible that firms allow management to waste their time attempting to prove that a woman's performance would change on certain days of the month. Why not check up on the performance of male football fanatics' performances on Monday mornings after their teams have lost? It would be the same pointless exercise.

The other side of this coin is success and it lies hidden in the twisted backgrounds of some men. It is a fact that men and women are frequently held to different standards and one of the most flexible is success. The habit of succeeding is often seen as attractive in a man but unattractive in a woman.

It is little wonder that women tend to attribute success to luck instead of skill. In MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report, 1,315 examples of this type of conditioning are quoted. But the IT industry has to consciously fight these biases more than most because of historically bad attitudes.

Trade shows are no longer draped with scantily clad women, but are women treated as equals when they attend Comdex or go abroad on business? No. And if more IT companies did the rounds of freshers' fairs and colleges promoting careers for women they might just increase the number of them. But marketing is something the channel has a lot to learn about.